Modelling of coastal long-wave dynamics on unstructured mixed meshes under strong nonlinearity and pronounced baroclinity Alexey Androsov, Sergey Danilov, Vera Fofonova, Natalja Rakowsky, Karen Helen Wiltshire and Sven Harig Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Postfach 12-01-61, 27515 Bremerhaven, Germany, (
[email protected] +49(0471) 4831-2106) Abstract Results: North Sea barotropic tides Numerical modelling of coastal zone dynamics provides basis for solving a wide range of hydrogeological, engineering and ecological problems. A novel three-dimensional unstructured-mesh model is applied to simulate the dynamics of the density field and turbulence characteristics. The model is based on a finite-volume discretization and works on mixed unstructured meshes composed of triangles and quads. Although triangular meshes are Fig. 1 Fragments of the quads (left) and mixed (right) mesh used in numerical simulations. most flexible geometrically, quads are more efficient numerically and do not support spurious Fig. 2 Tidal map of the M2 wave: the amplitude in cm and phase (solid line) in inertial modes of triangular cell-vertex discretization. Mixed meshes composed of triangles and Here we present results of simulations of M2 tide in the degrees. The triangles indicate the station locations. A dashed rectangle shows North Sea. A large amount of observations is available the domain where the mesh is refined; the transition zone is over its periphery. quads combine benefits of both. In particular, triangular transitional zones can be used to join for this region helping to validate the model. Computations have been performed on three meshes quadrilateral meshes of differing resolution.